The extremely bizarre and incongruous spectacle surrounding the ongoing political/media circus spawned by the Westboro Baptist Church's singular and unrelenting crusade against the iniquities of America has reached a crescendo of absurdity with arguments before the Supreme Court on the case of Snyder vs. Phelps. At issue is one of the more egregious of the Westboro Phelps family's signature antics of demonstrating at military funerals nationwide against the decadence and indecency of a nation which they perceive to be on greased rails to Gehenna due to its sinful ways. Originally directed against the pernicious influence on gays on our treasured moral values as a once God fearing nation, especially in the sacred ranks of the military, the scandalous and almost universally condemned spectacles staged by minister Fred Phelps and some 84 family members, who comprise the vast majority of the tiny Westboro congregation, have expanded to include obsequies marking the passing of any serviceman they can dredge up from a methodical scouring of military obituaries.
It was this ghoulish behavior which led them to position themselves a legally sanctioned (passed into Kansas State Law by Governor Kathleen Sibelius in 2007 and replicated in several states across the country) though scarcely respectful distance from a Catholic church in Westminister, Maryland one balmy spring day on March 10, 2006, as Marine Lance corporal Matthew Snyder was being laid to rest. Snyder had answered the call to duty shortly after September 11 only to fall victim to a Humvee accident in Iraq on March 3. As is usual with their increasingly familiar and garish pageants of shadenfreude, the Phelpses waved placards celebrating the deaths of US soldiers, the downfall of America and of course the execration of their erring and hell bound homosexual brethren.
The experience so traumatized Albert Snyder and his family that, with the help of the lawyer who had recently drawn up his will, and after witnessing his deceased son's graduation picture miraculously launch itself from its perch above the fireplace onto the floor, Snyder eventually sued Phelps and Westboro and won a spectacularly large judgment of $2 million along with $8 million in punitive damages. This victory was short lived however as the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision and in the end the grieving father had to pay some $16,510.80 in resulting court costs.
Of course, the one enduring and adamantine claim upon which the Phelps family dogma is founded is that God hates just about everyone, everywhere without reservation or discrimination and can hardly wait to punish the vast majority of the insensible and wicked brutes he has created with the everlasting and unquenchable flames of hell fire. This rather dire view of the human condition is relentlessly broadcast on their charming and thoroughly entertaining web site: http://www.godhatestheworld.com/. Needless to relate this tiny faction of backwoods wackos have ignited a serious firestorm of controversy which, with its loud din and hubbub, has drawn in media mavens and polticos right, left, and center across a wide political/media spectrum from the bloated Michael Moore to transsexual Ann Coulter and even George Bush 43 (who signed into law The Respect for Fallen Heroes Bill in 2007 in acknowledgement of the disruptive efforts of Phelps and his Westboro cadre), veritably uniting the hostile and warring political partisans of a deeply divided nation in common purpose.
Yet it might be suggested that the preternaturally sclerotic Mr. Phelps, who reserves special acerbic and obscene condemnation for his fellow Protestant Christian ministers and the Pope for condoning and even sanctioning homosexual and pedophiliac activity within their respective clergies (as in "Your Pastor Is A Whore"), embodies a high profile example of a shared collective mania which has gripped the national consciousness and which finds a particularly revealing focus in the strange nexus of Snyder vs. Phelps. In the larger context of the once unthinkable and widespread international conflicts in which the nation is embroiled, the side show spectacle of the Westboro provocations and their concommittant legal imbroglios seem insignificant. Simply put, Phelps personal abusive disrespect for the dead (and the living) pales in comparison with justifiable criticism of the significant and far more serious business of massive US genocidal wars in progress across the Middle East and South Central Asia, not to speak of the catastrophic economic conditions.
Yet, in germino, this tawdry and grotesque tabloid spectacle, is but only one of many of the pathological exhibitionisms emanating from what has become a distorted and highly dysfunctional American society in the terminal stages of complete societal breakdown. This particular misé en scene, however, exposes one of the major archetypal rifts which has haunted the nation down through the centuries from its inception. The source of this abnormality which has caused such a major national psychological dissociation is of course the deep strain of Puritanism á la Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards the nature of which was imaginatively expressed most admirably in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" and brought to the stage a century later in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible".
Anyone really interested in the diathesis of Mr. Phelps peculiar atavistic dementia would be well advised to undertake a study of Puritanism in America especially as creatively depicted by those artists so steeped in determinants of our historical and collective national mythos. Such deep and primeval soundings resonating from the past are emblematic of an unacknowledged and yet still living history which resides in our shared collective unconscious and occasionally manifests in the inchoate ravings of those amenable to these blind impulses such as Fred Phelps.
In a nation daily transfixed by the growing and irrefutable evidence of its own decline and fall, the numerous pathologies emerging and contending for a piece of the media spotlight trained on the anguished paroxysms of the national death throes, form a grotesque and absurdly theatrical social landscape which has transformed the once invincible triumphalism and exceptionalism of empire into chaotic farce. The spectacle of a nation once called "United" splintering and fracturing into factionalism, hybrid nationalism, and contention of mutually exclusive economic and political interests as the national wealth and substance is pillaged and pirated by Wall Street robber barons and their legislative enablers is made only more painfully obvious by the paltry nature of this internecine squabbling and bickering as the country slides mournfully into oblivion.
Nowhere is the nonsensical claptrap of this embarrassing display of buffoonery more evident than in the so called struggle for "gay rights". And this is precisely the arena in which religious demagogues like the Phelps find their firmest footholds thanks to the selective and focused agendas of corporate owned media in service to pan global enterprises. It goes without saying that it is the designed intention of the foundation funded think tanks and institutes such as Monroe and Tavistock whose occult blueprints for social engineering plan and effect the evisceration of national and social identities in the name of a bogus "equality" under law but only for certain classes and social groups which effectively promote their divisive and alienating agendas.
Mr. Phelps would undoubtedly not be surprised to find that the past two occupants of the Oval Office have been seriously compromised by alleged involvements in homosexual affairs. Barack Obama has been dogged by persistent and highly credible allegations raised by Larry Sinclair regarding sex and cocaine use with Sinclair. Tom Heneghan and Wayne Madsen have also exposed Obama and Rahm Emanuel as mutually frequenting the Mountain Man gay bath house in Chicago. Bush 43's drug use is common knowledge and he has been linked with male prostitute and White House "correspondent" Jeff Gannon. GHW Bush of course was implicated as having pedophiliac sex parties at the White House during the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, allegations which made front page news at the Washington Post before being summarily quashed. Of course these closeted homosexuals and lesbians (Hillary Clinton) however highly placed are highly unstable personalities and most susceptible to black mail, extortion, and coercion which is most amenable to the purposes of their handlers and controllers as well as making them high risks to national security. Indeed the halls of power are redolent of pervasive promiscuity, perversion, and sexual vice as befits those whose public personas serve only to conceal the vile filth of sadistic and deviant sexual pursuits which seem to be the necessary concomitants of these slaves to absolute power, obsessive control, and above all the worship of the prince of this world.
Thus, perhaps much like the Romans of the decadence in the reign of Commodus, the hopelessly corrupt American power elite and their worshipful minions, having availed themselves of such an unrestrained foray into similar exploits of sexual depravity, indecency, and licentiousness, await a universal chastisement of biblical proportions similar to that visited upon Sodom and Gommorah. If so, Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church will have reserved VIP seats front and center at the apocalyptic cataclysm. Convinced as they are that they are numbered among the righteous elect they will await, no doubt, their eternal reward and vindication. And yet an unfamiliar pang of guilt might send a quiver of apprehension up their righteous spines when they hear the following:
"Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison and you did not care for me...Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me" Mt.25- 41-14, 45
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